Line heating is an effective and economical process for forming flat metal plates into three-dimensional shapes for plating of ships. Because the nature of the line heating process is a transient thermal process, followed by a thermo elastic plastic stress field, predicting deformed shapes of plate is very difficult and complex problem. In this paper, neural network model o3r solving the inverse problem of metal forming is proposed. The backpropagation neural network systems for determining line-heating positions from object shape of plate are reported in this paper. Two cases of the network are constructed-the first case has 18 lines which have different positions and directions and the second case has 10 parallel heating lines. The input data are vertical displacements of plate and the output data are selected heating lines. The train sets of neural network are obtained by using an analytical solution that predicts plate deformations in line heating process. This method shows the feasibility that the neural network can be used to determine the heating-line positions in line heating process.